Well, maybe the people e-mailing me, asking me on various IM networks and whatnot isn’t readers of The Blog Herald, but some at least should be. They aren’t ignorant newbies, they’ve been around online for quite some time, and most of them aren’t afraid of hacking a bit of code. Still, they are confused. Where is 2.4?

Skipping a version is one thing, but not updating the naming convention appropriately, for consistency’s sake, is just plain stupid. Maybe the WordPress team intend to do that, maybe the next release will be called 2.4 after all, but that surely doesn’t come across anywhere.

I’ll say it again. You’re confusing web developers, people who are working with WordPress with clients, or with their own projects, and when they are confused, then they might think twice before recommending the platform.

There is no logical way to defend skipping a whole sub-version for the public. What the next version is called behind the scenes is one thing, but users should be able to expect 4 to follow 3.

What’s next? Skipping 3.0, going straight to 4.0?

I sincerely hope that the WordPress team, who does a great job and I’m grateful for it, will come to their senses on this one. I’m hoping it’s miscommunication, that they always intended to call the next version 2.4 and nothing else, no matter what developer version they might base it on. But right now I just don’t know, and that makes me a bit queasy about the whole thing. A small matter perhaps, but nonetheless. And I work with these things…

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Comments

Though if this is the case, it is not very logical and will confuse a lot of people. It is common for projects to skip sub-versions completely, usually going from 1.6 straight to 2 for public releases. This is different of course, but I don’t find it that jarring or strange, just kind of dumb. As you said, hopefully what they release to the public will follow the same version numbering conventions, unless they like the backlash it will cause.

They have a roadmap a few versions ahead, which allows them to know where they want to be for version X. While working on 2.4 they realized there were more things that they wanted to do, and they didn’t want to release something half done.

They decided to push the next release to the 2.5 release date, which also gave them time to work on stuff from their 2.5 roadmap. The next version will be 2.5. They “skipped” 2.4.

I don’t think the versioning really matters all that much in the grand scheme of things. If they come out and called it version 2008.2 I wouldn’t care, as long as I was able to easily understand that 2008.2 was the latest version and that I should upgrade to it.